REVIEW: ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Episode 5 – “Series Acclimation Mil”

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episode 5 is the series’s quiet pivot point. Where earlier episodes focused on institutions rebuilding after collapse, “Series Acclimation Mil” turns inward, asking what it means to belong when your very existence challenges the assumptions of the people around you. In doing so, it delivers the season’s most intimate episode so far, and one of its most thoughtful.

This is Sam’s episode, and the show has been patiently building toward it. Sam (Kerrice Brooks) has often been framed as “too much”: too curious, too present, too eager. Here, that discomfort finally gets contextualized. As a non-corporeal being, Sam isn’t just another cadet navigating Starfleet Academy: she’s an emissary for an entire people watching from a distance, unsure whether organics are capable of trust at all. Her continued presence at the Academy isn’t guaranteed. It’s conditional. Progress isn’t encouraged; it’s demanded.

What Starfleet Academy Episode 5 understands immediately is that this demand is unreasonable in a very human way. Sam is expected to understand organics when organics barely understand themselves. That pressure pushes her toward one of the Academy’s most unconventional courses, ‘Confronting the Unexplainable.’ The course provides a space where logic gives way to belief, contradiction, and unresolved questions.

From there, “Series Acclimation Mil” makes a deeply intentional choice: grounding Sam’s search for meaning in the legacy of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and specifically Captain Benjamin Sisko.

Starfleet Academy Episode 5 centers on Sam and her quest for meaning.

Sam is told early on that studying Sisko isn’t about solving a mystery. Her professor frames the course as an exploration of impact rather than outcome, focusing on the life Sisko lived and the choices he made, rather than on the mechanics of his disappearance.

That guidance doesn’t stop Sam from wanting answers, though. It gives her permission to ask better questions. For someone whose own existence is constantly being assessed, the urge to understand whether agency can exist alongside forces beyond comprehension feels unavoidable. “Series Acclimation Mil” allows that curiosity to stand on its own, treating the search itself as meaningful.

Even for viewers unfamiliar with Deep Space Nine, Starfleet Academy Episode 5 makes Sisko’s character clear with remarkable clarity. Portrayed by the late Avery Brooks, Sisko wasn’t just another Starfleet captain: he was a rupture in the franchise’s expectations. As Star Trek’s first Black captain to lead a series, Brooks brought a gravity and authority that reshaped what leadership looked like on-screen.

Calling back to Sisko and his impact on the franchise is a brilliant choice that ties into the series’ themes.

Benjamin Sisko defined himself in opposition to inherited ideals, immediately distinguishing his command from figures like Jean-Luc Picard with moments that told you everything you needed to know: punching Q and declaring, “I am not Picard.”

What often gets overlooked, and what Starfleet Academy Episode 5 quietly honors, is that much of Sisko’s legacy had nothing to do with prophecy at all. During the Dominion War, he made choices shaped by survival rather than idealism, compromises that fractured Starfleet’s moral certainty.

His infamous “I can live with it” moment remains one of Star Trek’s most honest reckonings with power and responsibility, precisely because it offers no absolution. Starfleet Academy Episode 5 treats Sisko not as a mystery to solve, but as a life shaped by faith, failure, and consequence.

Sam’s journey is similar to Sisko’s, as their existence intersects with multiple variables.

That legacy becomes a mirror for Sam. Like Sisko, Sam exists at the intersection of systems that don’t share the same understanding of agency. She grapples with whether her path is chosen or predetermined. Whether being an emissary means surrendering autonomy, and whether meaning can exist without explanation. Starfleet Academy Episode 5 wisely refuses to answer those questions outright. Instead, it lets Sam sit with them.

Visually, Starfleet Academy Episode 5 leans into Sam’s perspective. The cinematography becomes more stylized, more computational, reflecting how she processes information and emotion differently from her peers. Her engagement with Sisko’s story isn’t academic; it’s experiential. Scenes unfold through holographic interpretation, archival material, and text in ways that only she can access. It’s one of the most inventive uses of perspective the series has attempted so far.

Caleb (Sandro Rosta)’s role is smaller here, but it reflects one of the season’s quietest evolutions. He’s openly skeptical of Sam’s search for answers, dismissive of the idea that an 800-year-old mystery can yield anything meaningful. To Caleb, the past is something you survive, not something you wait on for clarity. And yet, despite that cynicism, he still shows up for her. 

Unfortunately, Starfleet Academy Episode 5’s secondary plot is more distracting than impactful.

He helps in the only ways he knows how: through shared experiences, physical presence, and emotional release, echoing Sisko’s grounded, embodied style of leadership. Starfleet Academy Episode 5 frames that effort not as understanding, but as growth. Caleb doesn’t need to believe in answers to believe in his fellow cadet, and across each episode, that willingness to show up has become one of his most defining traits.

For all the good the episode accomplishes, the B-plot involving Chancellor Ake (Holly Hunter) and Chancellor Kelrec (Raoul Bhaneja) feels like a distraction. Rather than deepening Sam’s story, it pulls focus away in order to stage a lesson for Kelrec that never lands with the same weight. That imbalance is especially noticeable in an episode so invested in Benjamin Sisko, a figure who entered Star Trek as a commander grappling with responsibility, not a subordinate needing correction.

By comparison, Kelrec’s arc reads oddly juvenile, particularly alongside Sam, who has technically only been “alive” for months yet displays far greater emotional awareness. The contrast undercuts Starfleet Academy Episode 5’s strongest throughline by drawing attention to splits where it isn’t needed.

Despite the secondary plot’s failure to add weight, the episode still manages to work.

Even with those missteps, Starfleet Academy Episode 5 succeeds because it trusts uncertainty as a meaningful space rather than a flaw to correct. It treats curiosity as growth, questions as identity, and belief as something that can exist alongside reason without needing resolution. By centering Sam, a being who exists outside familiar categories, the episode reaffirms why Starfleet exists in the first place: not to explain the universe, but to engage with it openly.

In tying Sam’s journey to Benjamin Sisko’s legacy and Avery Brooks’ groundbreaking impact on the franchise, Starfleet Academy Episode 5 reaches beyond nostalgia. It honors a captain who reshaped Star Trek by confronting the unknowable without surrendering his agency, and it extends that philosophy forward. “Series Acclimation Mil” reminds us that Star Trek’s most powerful stories aren’t built on answers, but on the choice to move forward anyway: especially when certainty is impossible.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Episodes 1-5 are streaming now on Paramount+ with new episodes every Thursday.

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